Two-Bit Heroes

by Doris Egan

  But Cord held back. "Dramonta hasn't agreed to join you," he said.

  "Dramonta is wrong. But you don't need to follow him down the wrong path."

  "Easy for you to say, my friend. Have you heard I pay a tribute to Dramonta?"

  "The whole Sector has heard," said Des coolly. "They say your nickname ought to be The Only Outlaw Who Still Pays Taxes."

  That hit home, I saw. Cord practically flinched. It wasn't like Des to make a dig like that, but it was like Stereth.

  Cord said, "I've heard of your band's reputation. Who hasn't? But I have a life to live, and people I'm responsible for right here. I don't want to make any more enemies than I've got, and if a share of booty will appease Dramonta he can have it."

  "A pardon would reduce your number of enemies considerably," Des pointed out.

  "Pardons don't help dead people. Look, we all know the Emperor could crush us to pulp if he cared to make the effort. And spend the money. So why give him a reason?"

  "Look, uh, gracious sir. What we all know is that when it comes to money the Emperor is so tight he squeaks when he walks. He doesn't want to send an army here. Pardons are cheap. —And as for friends, as opposed to enemies? Stereth has a lot more friends than you do right now. And that's not accidental. They believe he can succeed. / believe he can succeed. What have you heard about the tah blockade?"

  He was puzzled. "The what?"

  Des explained. Finally Tarniss Cord said, "It may be possible. But I'm a cautious bastard, that's why I'm here and in charge. I tell you what, gracious sir. If Stereth can take every tah shipment between now and the beginning of Fire Moon, I'll accept his offer. He'll need a long reach, though, my friend. And plenty of luck. Tell him Deathwell will be watching."

  "And if he has reach and luck? Will you give a road-oath?"

  Cord laughed. "You won't leave without an assurance, will you?"

  "No, sir."

  "You ask a great deal of a stranger, you know. If Dramonta finds out even this much of our conversation, he'll kill me."

  "I'm not asking you to swear with your hand over your heart," said Des coolly. "Someplace lower down would do better for me."

  Cord's smile vanished. "If you think I don't have what it takes to run a band of outlaws, you're mistaken. Whatever direction I choose to take them in."

  Having gotten his effect, it was time for Des to step back and be conciliatory. "I don't question the courage of anyone who would willingly live in Deathwell. I'm just asking you to shine a little of it in my direction."

  "I've said that I'll accept if he can begin the blockade. I swear it on my life as a cantry tar'meth and on the lives of every man I'm responsible for." He spat. It just missed the pit. "Satisfied?"

  "Yes. Thank you, sir." Des took hold of my arm. "Come along, Tymon, let's see if we can find one of those baths. Unless you'd like us to continue helping, sir?"

  "Get along, both of you. And remember, I'll be watching."

  We stayed that night at Deathwell, through a thunderstorm that howled like a three-year-old, with no pause for the nerves of its listeners. Daramin took care of us; I never saw any others of the band the whole time I was there. Tarniss Cord really was cautious.

  Sometime toward morning, when the blackness had changed to gray through the windowslit and the after-storm hours held an unnatural stillness, I heard a skittering sound in my room. I was sleeping on a cot in one of the tiny officer's rooms on the fourth story; Des was next door, and Daramin was somewhere within shouting distance on the floor. The generator was off for the night and there were no candles, but the lightening sky brought the objects in my room into dim relief.

  Something moved over by the bureau. I sat bolt upright. Behind the bar of soap I'd brought from the fort, behind the hairbrush—

  Kanz. It was a frangi.

  Pyrene is responsible for the frangis. They are indigenous to that planet and we (I say "we" as a native-born) have to take the blame for carelessly transporting the vermin around to our neighbors.

  Fortunately, they're only slightly poisonous to most people. However, that was not why I froze. I don't know whether it's their blindness, or the silence when they move on some surfaces or the rustle when they move on others. Or the way their radar causes them to dart at you unexpectedly. Or their repulsive, repellent, gods-cursed, sickening

  appearance, or the way they rub their—never mind. But they scare the beejeebers out of me.

  If I could make it out the door before it got anywhere near me… it skittered toward the edge of the bureau, and suddenly I was standing outside the room. I slammed the door and looked around the corridor, sweating. Dara-min was around somewhere, but I wanted to avoid letting Tarniss Cord's group know what a coward Stereth had sent them. I walked over to Des' door and pounded on it.

  "Wha, what—" Des is difficult to wake up. I went inside and closed the door behind me, just in case the frangi got out of my room.

  "It's me, Des."

  "Tymon… I'm sleeping."

  "Des, there's a frangi in my room."

  He peered dimly up at me from the bed. "What?"

  "There's a frangi in my room!"

  He continued to stare at me disorientedly. "Yeah?"

  Didn't he realize this was a crisis? "If you can't do something about it, I'll have to stay here for the night."

  "Ty, I'm always happy to share a bed with you, but . . you say there's a frangi in your room."

  "You've grasped it, Des."

  He ran a hand over his face, sighed, and stood up. "All right, come show me where it is."

  "It was on the bureau last time I saw," I said, making no move to follow him.

  "Double and triple kanz," he said, and left. He was gone for several minutes.

  Finally he returned. "All taken care of," he said. "It's dead."

  "You swear?" Sometimes Des was a little loose with the truth when it came to his personal exploits.

  "I swear on my continued hope of existence. On my road-name. On my mother's sainted head—"

  "Where's the body?"

  He lowered himself into the bed. "You don't want to know. Good night, Tymon."

  I started for the door. He called, "Tymon—" and I turned.

  "Uh… sweetheart, I'm sorry if I was a little difficult. I'm… not good at killing."

  For Des to admit there was anything he wasn't good at was uncharacteristic, and generous. I said, "That's all right. I appreciate your understanding of my little quirks."

  "Well, we all have them." He settled into the bed.

  The next morning had the momentary clarity on the Plateau that follows a particularly vicious bout of weather. You could see for leagues. "Not a good day to travel," said Des. "Unless you're a respectable citizen."

  We were riding through a section even more desolate than usual, with only the wind-twisted trees for company. The sky was incredibly beautiful. Not far from here, I knew, was a homemade gibbet on a hill that we had passed on the way to Deathwell. It was the sort of place where disgruntled farmers and ranchers took outlaws they'd captured, when they didn't feel like traveling to the authorities. No doubt it was less popular now that the Governor's reward was in effect. A skeleton still swung from it, though. ("Tev! Good to see you!" Des had called as we passed it. "How are you doing these days?" Des' sense of humor sometimes left something to be desired.)

  Remembering his handling of Tarniss Cord, though, I had to admit I had done our Des an injustice. He was more letter-perfect than I ever could have been. And he hadn't rushed off afterward into the gathering rain-clouds, either, but waited out the night like a sensible boy. He knew quite well what he could do and what he couldn't, regardless of his boasting.

  I told him of my admiration. This was the sort of topic he never minded hearing about. "It was nothing, Tymon," he said casually. "It was just important that Cord take us seriously, so I keyed in a little personality change."

  "Gods in assembly, Des, you should be in the theater!"

  "I was. Thre
e years in the Sotar Touring Company. Didn't I ever mention it? I was Copalis in Death of an Emperor. 'This night, my friends, this night when the lighted boats of Anemee will never reach their slips on the lake of noble souls; this night—' " In typical Des fashion he'd veered not into Copalis, but Petev, the character who'd killed him and had the better lines. It's one of the most famous soliloquies in all of Ivoran literature, the speech Lord Petev practices to himself on the tower by the Impe-

  rial Palace the night the dynasty went through a name change. Des declaimed it to the vast emptiness around us, charging his voice with a rolling melodrama suitable to the infinity of grass and sky.

  I let him finish, then took my hands from my mount long enough to clap.

  "Thank you," he said. "Tarniss Cord is nothing compared to a provincial audience. And besides, I had plenty of practice for yesterday—by now, I can do Stereth better than Stereth can do Stereth. I can do him so that everybody recognizes him."

  "They recognize him now."

  "No, I mean really recognize." He touched his hand to the bridge of his nose as though adjusting a pair of glasses. "I hope, Tymon, you're not going to make a fuss about a simple request." The voice was an echo of Stereth's, and the words were from his briefing for the trip to Deathwell.

  The cool jade eyes turned to me, and I marveled at their precision. You could almost see a beam of white light marking the track of his attention. I said, "All right, you've made your point."

  He ignored me. "Because one recalcitrant in the band is enough. Our goal is going to take a full commitment from every person here—"

  He went on, doing a play-by-play, only slightly improvised variation on Stereth's speech. It was more shocking to hear it from Des, though. There was a quality in it that I'd never fully realized before. It was like looking at a portrait and becoming aware of a facial feature whose prominence one had never grasped in the original. Stereth's manner was softened physically by the spectacles and be-haviorally by his closeness to the band; but this quality was there in him. It was the thing that made us careful around him, even when we didn't consciously recognize why—and Des had located this chip of ice and pried it out.

  It was still three kilometers to the gibbet, and the ride was spooky enough. I snapped, "For the gods' sake, Des, break character or I'll go out of my mind!"

  He must have known from my voice that I was serious. His head tipped forward and he raised one hand. What in the world? Oh. Removing imaginary glasses.

  "Sorry," said Des' regular voice.

  We rode in silence for a minute. Then I said, "Do you ever do Stereth for Stereth?"

  "Ha, ha," he answered briefly.

  "And what in heaven's name are you doing in the Northwest Sector?"

  "Ah, well, Tymon, when I left the troupe I got into a bit of trouble in Mira-Stoden. A friend of mine had an idea for making money quickly, but it didn't work out."

  "But you're so good, why didn't you stick with it?"

  He knew at once I meant "stick with acting," yet seemed surprised by the question. "There's no money in it, Tymon," he said reasonably.

  I absorbed that. "Of course. My mistake, Des."

  About five minutes later he said, "You get to meet a lot of women, though."

  A guard whom we didn't know stopped us at the entrance to Stereth's valley. "Des Helani," said Des, in response to his challenge. "And who the hell are you?"

  "I'm the lookout," said the guard. He was practically a boy, younger than Paravit-Col by several years. Then he said, "Des Helani! And Tymon? You two are from the original band, aren't you?"

  Des softened under the influence of the obvious hero-worship in the boy's voice. "Yeah, we are. I hope the original band is still here."

  "Oh, yes, sir! Things haven't changed that much."

  We'd only been gone a couple of days, but things seemed different enough to me. More new bands had come in, and though I found out later that Stereth had mixed them and sent over half out again under the leadership of Komo and Sembet Triol, there were a good two dozen people in the yard as we entered. Mostly women. I found out why as we walked through the hall; it was afternoon, and the men's practice class was going on. That was a bit unreal, too—it was not a mirror image of our own by any means. Many of the moves were the same and many of the moves were different, but what was most different were the epithets Lex and Grateth yelled at the recruits. "Kanz! Worm! Boneless sloth! What do you think you're doing! You're thinking again, aren't you, you shell-less turtle, you tax-collector's asshole!" I walked on, startled, and mentioned

  it to Carabinstereth at the next practice session. She just nodded. "The men get torn down, and the women get built up. Don't ask me why, it's just that it seems to work."

  Stereth took our reports on the Deathwell trip. Des said, "Things have been happening here, too, haven't they?"

  "We've been busy. I heard there was a tah shipment from Ordralake coming on the Shaskala Road so I decided to have Komo intercept it. We're not taking hostages right now, though—we don't have space for them."

  Des said, "I'm glad you decided to make a move, or we might've lost Tarniss Cord before you even knew he was available." Stereth had merely nodded, unsurprised, when Des reported that part of our conversation in Deathwell.

  "It seemed a good time." He turned his attention to me. "Well, Tymon, what was your impression of Cord?"

  I said, "Stereth, when you say you're not taking hostages, does that mean you confiscate their weapons and let them go?"

  "No. What did you think of Cord?"

  "I think he's a cautious man, like he says he is. I think he's honest… as honest as you can be and still run a bunch of cantry tar'meth."

  He smiled briefly. "Speaking of weapons, we now have six light-rifles. I'm issuing one to each group that goes out. Not everyone who joins us now can stay here; we can't turn the place into an army camp. So we're training, processing, and releasing them into newly formed guerrilla bands. If you want to go out with one, Tymon, let me know. Obviously I'm not going to send Sokol away, but since you two seem to be having trouble—"

  I was startled. "What do you mean, having trouble?"

  "Maybe not trouble. A strained relationship."

  "Who says our relationship is strained?"

  "Perhaps I misunderstood. It was an impression I got from my conversation with him on the day you left for Deathwell. I apologize for my misconception. Des, could you go through the roster with me over here—"

  I was dismissed. Of course I went straight to Ran. He was just out of practice class, walking toward the waterjars to cool down.

  "Ran, Stereth thinks our relationship is strained."

  "Stereth's views are of no concern to me."

  Uh-oh. That was not a good answer. "Does that mean it's not strained?"

  He stopped, wet a rag in the water, and wiped his neck. "It may be pulled a little thin, Theodora. I wouldn't say it's strained. But it's not exactly robust, either, when I don't even know where you've been for the last few days."

  "Stereth didn't tell you? I went to Deathwell with Des Helani to meet their leader."

  "Really? Did you have a nice trip?"

  I was getting a little annoyed myself. "Tolerable. Look, you seem to be forgetting we're not here voluntarily. I can't choose where I go and what I do."

  "No." He was silent. "Were you successful? Did the Deathwell leader agree to come in on this craziness of Stereth's?"

  "Conditionally. Des got him to swear a road-oath. It was great to watch, I had no idea he was that good at protecting Stereth's interests. I mean, you know I think the world of Des, but—"

  "I know."

  Suddenly a lot of things became clear. I put a hand on his wrist to halt his washing. "Des is one of the sweetest people I've ever met. And his entertainment value is priceless. But I'm about as attracted to him as I am to that furry thing with the teeth that he rides."

  He said, "I didn't ask, did I?" and he bent over to clean his face. But the edge was
gone from his voice.

  One hurdle surmounted and several dozen more to go. I sat out on the broken wall that evening by myself, and thought gloomy thoughts. He'd probably walk out of the fort tonight if I agreed to go along with it—a suicide walk, as far I was concerned, and I'd always considered him a model of enlightened self-interest. Ran and I had never had such major differences over strategy as we'd had this summer in the Northwest Sector. And a close analysis could not help but reveal that the difference in strategy were based on deeper differences as to what was important and what was not.

  I had to accept the fact that being kidnapped by outlaws was not having a good effect on our engagement. * * *

  Ten days later was graduation day for my practice group. Just to up the ante, Carabinstereth was allowing the men in to watch, and any of the new women who were interested. If we made it to the end of class, we wouldn't be novices anymore. Standing between each of us and the end of class were Lex, Komo, and Grateth, who would be attacking us with hands, feet, knives, clubs, and pistols. And anything else that entered their perverted heads in the course of the event. Needless to say, every student was a wreck for at least a full day ahead of time.

  I'd told Ran not to come. I was afraid of messing up and looking like a fool in front of him. For some reason he had a high opinion of my abilities, and I didn't want to destroy it. He told me he was on water-duty anyway, and would be busy hauling jars all morning.

  I waited on the line that day, watching the blunted knives being laid out on the floor, feeling sorry for myself. / didn't ask to be here. The knives, by the way, though blunted, could still do serious harm if we weren't careful. The clubs were regular clubs. And the pistols were supposed to be discharged, but one never knew when an extra store was being held. If Ran really cared, he'd have shown up anyway. Oh, terrific. Now you'd like him to read your mind. No, but I'd like him here… in case I don't screw up. But if I do screw up, I want him far away.